Girl of Flesh and Metal

by Alicia Ellis

  Before signing off, the blonde reporter added, “We’ll keep you updated with further developments.”

  The hand-screen went black and then returned to the list of search results. I subscribed to new updates on the topic, so I’d be alerted.

  If the reporter had her facts straight, the police would be investigating the Miller family, since they were the ones who wouldn’t have had an issue with the household security system. I couldn’t imagine Melody or Mr. or Mrs. Miller doing this to Harmony. Next, law enforcement would branch out and investigate her friends—especially me, since I’d just had a fight with her. When they interviewed me, I wouldn’t be able to give them an alibi.

  I couldn’t prove my innocence—not even to myself.

  11

  My hand-screen buzzed with an incoming call just as I was shoving it back into my bag in the restroom. The small readout on its side announced it was my mom calling. I debated not answering, but then I’d never hear the end of it later.

  “Hey.”

  “Lena, I need you to meet me in front of the school.”

  I groaned and made no attempt to hide the sound. “Please tell me you’re not here.”

  “I don’t have all day to sit in the parking lot. Come outside please.” Despite her use of the word please, this was not a request.

  I trudged down the stairs and to the front of the school. One of our black cars idled at the curb. The door slid upward, and my mother stepped out. Her ivory pantsuit made her brown skin glow, and her tight coils of hair were gathered into a neat bun. A man I didn’t know stepped out of the vehicle after her.

  He looked a decade younger than my mother, so probably in his late twenties. A dark suit covered broad, thick shoulders, and his head towered above my mother’s. That had to put him at well over six feet tall. He wore his dark hair in a buzz cut. Overall, he had the look of every military man I’d ever seen in movies.

  “This is Owen,” my mom said. “He’s going to be your bodyguard until this whole Harmony mess blows over.”

  “Harmony mess?” I motioned air quotes when I repeated it back. “You mean the mess where my friend Harmony was murdered in her own home?” My mother didn’t know about my fight with her, so she couldn’t call me out on my dubious use of the term friend.

  “Yes, dear. That mess.” As usual, her face stayed emotionless.

  Sometimes, I wanted to tilt back my head and scream—in public—just to see if she’d react to it. I gritted my teeth to keep myself from doing just that. “I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  “I wish you’d be more agreeable, but since you insist on doing this the hard way . . .” She touched her ear to activate her micro-comm, then said, “Transfer file name Threat Letter to Lena Hayes.”

  My hand-screen buzzed in the front pocket of my backpack. I withdrew it and opened it. The display showed a document with the words CyberCorp Confidential digitally stamped across the top. It was an anonymous letter addressed to “the greedy fat cats at CyberCorp.” So far, this letter writer and I were on the same page.

  The ungodly cannot be permitted to live, the letter read. This is a warning. The Model Ones mean death for humanity. They are evil incarnate. Stop the rollout, or destruction will follow. Death to the spawn of CyberCorp.

  I pictured the man in the parking lot of CyberCorp, barreling toward me, screaming about how we all deserved to die. He had used some of the same words. Had he written the letter—or maybe someone else who just happened to be on the same train to crazy town?

  More importantly, it looked like my mother had a point about the bodyguard. Harmony’s murder might not have been an isolated incident. More of CyberCorp’s kids could be targeted.

  I couldn’t have killed Harmony, because whoever wrote this letter had done it.

  “You think I’m in danger?” I asked her.

  “You’re in no danger at all. We get this type of thing all the time, and it’s always nothing. Most likely, Harmony’s murder has nothing to do with us or this letter.” Her eyes flicked up and then down again in her frigid approximation of an eye roll. “But half of my senior staff has hired bodyguards, and your father and I can’t look like we don’t care about our own.”

  Of course. She was more concerned about appearances than anything else. But it stung that she’d come here not to protect me, but to make herself look good. “Do you know how Harmony died?” I asked.

  She gave her head a firm shake. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go into that right now.”

  “I’m going to find out somehow. If you want me to cooperate with this bodyguard, I need to know what exactly I’m supposed to be worried about.”

  She cocked one dark eyebrow upward. “If I tell you how your friend died, you’ll accept the bodyguard without further argument?”

  I nodded. There was no way she would let me go back inside without Owen. I might as well bargain for something.

  “She was strangled in her bed.”

  Reflexively, my hand rose to my throat and touched the soft flesh there. The muscles in my neck moved as I exhaled. I felt most safe in the world when I was lying alone in my bed at night, nestled deep beneath the covers. The thought of struggling for my life—kicking and writhing as some man choked the life from me in my own bed—sent a shudder through me.

  “Why didn’t their alarms go off? What about the cameras and chip scanners?”

  “The entire system was shut down for five minutes during the night. The cameras were off, and the chip scanners got nothing.”

  “I’ll take the bodyguard.” I tucked the hand-screen back in my bag.

  She nodded and switched her attention to her new favorite topic. “Is everything working out with the arm?”

  “Fully operational. All systems go.” I lifted it and waved my metal fingers at her. “Thanks to the massive betrayal from my parents.”

  “I told Dr. Fisher you’d stop by after school today, just to make sure the arm’s adapting as intended. Owen will escort you.”

  “Fine.” I’d planned a visit anyway, so that Ron could stop me from seeing things on the EyeNet.

  Without another word, she disappeared back into the black vehicle, leaving Owen standing beside me. The door whirred shut behind her.

  Owen stuck out in contrast to the few students moving across the lawn between classes. A couple teachers were out here as well, but they had a studious look in jeans and blazers or business-casual wear.

  Owen, on the other hand, wore a dark-gray suit over impossibly large shoulders and long legs. He held his back too straight. Everything about him screamed bodyguard. No one would mistake him for a teacher or a student.

  “You’re not coming into my classes,” I told him after the car pulled away.

  “I’ll accompany you into your classrooms, check them for security threats, and then wait outside.” He spoke with a slight accent I couldn’t place.

  “What if I have to pee?”

  “I’ll accompany you into the restroom, check it for security threats, and then wait outside.”

  “What if you have to pee?”

  He hesitated for less than a second. “I won’t, ma’am.”

  “How do you know? You don’t pee?”

  “I won’t need to, ma’am.”

  “But you plan for these things, right? Humor me. What’s the plan if you need to pee?”

  “I call one of my colleagues to guard you.”

  “And you just hold it until he gets here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if you waited out here? I could check in between classes, and you could pee whenever you feel like it. Everybody wins.”

  His lips pressed into a tight line. “No.”

  I guessed he was done humoring me. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I had to find my little joys somewhere.

  The second-period bell rang. I repositioned my bag on my back and hurried into the building. Owen trailed six feet behind me. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, bu
t now I received more stares than I had ten minutes ago.

  When Debbie Carlyle approached from the opposite end of the hallway, I relaxed a bit. A bodyguard trailed Debbie too, so I wasn’t alone in that. Her mother worked at CyberCorp. She was some kind of doctor, whose job I assumed was similar to Fisher’s.

  As Debbie and I passed each other, our gazes locked. She rolled her eyes, but I could see the tension in her shoulders.

  I might hate the additional attention that a bodyguard brought me, but the alternative was a worse fate. If someone was out there hunting the kids of CyberCorp employees, how long would it take him to come after me?

  12

  My hand-screen buzzed a few minutes after the bell that ended morning classes. A message rolled across the screen from Liv: “In the cafeteria.”

  I ducked my head and hurried through the halls toward the lunchroom. Once there, I selected my food as quickly as possible. The students behind me in line mumbled under their breaths as I dug into my pocket for a pay card.

  The rest of them simply waved their wrists over the payment scanner, which read ID chips and automatically withdrew money from students’ bank accounts. I’d decided my chip was useless now that the metal from my arm would shield it, so I’d left it on my nightstand.

  My bodyguard trailed behind me while I strode to Liv’s table, which—thankfully—stood nowhere near the table I usually shared with my old friends. I dropped my tray and slid into the seat next to her.

  “Liv, this is Owen,” I said. “Owen, meet Liv.”

  He gave a tense nod and went back to surveying the space around me.

  “A bodyguard?” Liv asked.

  “Yep.”

  Her eyes went wide. “You think you’re in danger? Because of Harmony?”

  I pushed aside the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach—the feeling that reminded me Harmony and I had been best friends for three years before the one day we weren’t. When I saw her yesterday morning, before our falling out, she’d been so happy to see me.

  Even though Harmony and Melody were identical twins, they had their physical differences. Harmony had a dimple on her left cheek, but it only showed when she was truly happy. Her fake smiles—the ones she gave teachers—looked just like Melody’s. But her real ones could brighten any room.

  I would never see that smile again.

  “I’ll be okay.” I licked my lips and swallowed, trying to remove the lump in my throat. “CyberCorp received a letter this morning. It said something about how the kids of CyberCorp employees will die because of the Model Ones.”

  Liv’s mouth dropped open. “You think it’s serious?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. My mom thinks it’s just talk. Owen here is for appearances, since some of the other CyberCorp kids have bodyguards.” I gestured toward my guard, who stood directly behind me. “Typical Marissa.” I paused to chew a forkful of food.

  Liv laughed, but then smothered it when I didn’t join her.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird,” I said, “that someone would kill Harmony instead of her dad? If you want to stop CyberCorp from making Model Ones, you kill the top engineer, not his kid. Right? Without Mr. Miller, the Model One rollout might have to be postponed.”

  “Maybe. If he’s trying to scare CyberCorp employees, killing their kids sounds like the way to go.”

  “I guess.” It didn’t make sense. Why take the long way of killing kids to stop their parents? Not that I approved of the killing at all, but if you were going to do it, why not go right for the source?

  Someone who hated CyberCorp so much that he’d commit murder had been in Greg Miller’s house—and had left Greg Miller untouched. That story was hard to swallow. As much as I hated to admit it, I was beginning to agree with my mother. This murder had nothing to do with CyberCorp or the threatening letter.

  “Who do you think killed her?” Liv asked.

  Before I could answer, a tray of food landed on the table next to me, and Hunter dropped down into a chair. He smelled minty and fresh, like he’d just stepped out of the shower. An instant later, my bodyguard was standing between my seat and Hunter’s, his hand on Hunter’s shoulder. Hunter winced at the pressure.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “We’re friends.”

  Owen nodded and returned to the spot behind me.

  “We’re friends?” Hunter grinned at me.

  I waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll take what I can get right now.”

  “I feel like I should be offended.”

  “Go with your gut.” In spite of this awful day, I smiled.

  “You were talking about Harmony?” he said.

  “Some anti-CyberCorp terrorist might have done it,” Liv said. “CyberCorp got a threatening letter.”

  “Which was a secret.” I glared at her.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone,” Hunter said. “But at least now you know it wasn’t you.”

  I hadn’t really looked at him this morning when he hit me with the news about Harmony. Now, with him leaning in to hear our whispers, I couldn’t help it.

  Although shorter than when we’d first met, his hair still fell a bit too long—an awkward length that let the ends curl in odd directions. Most of it was combed backward, but one piece near the front hung to the side, sticking upward.

  His eyes, which I’d thought were brown, were green around the pupils, darkening to brown at the edges of the irises. They stood out sharply against thick, dark eyelashes. Above them, a scar sliced through his left eyebrow. I liked it. It gave his face character.

  He wasn’t thickly muscled like Jackson and the guys I usually found attractive. But tight muscles defined the forearms he’d laid on the table to lean closer to me.

  “Lena doesn’t think the person who wrote the letter is the murderer,” Liv said.

  Apparently, we were going to discuss this with Hunter whether I liked it or not. “If it’s the same guy, his strategy sucks. If he wants to stop CyberCorp from making robots, he should have killed Greg Miller. He’s either the worst murderer ever when it comes to choosing targets, or it’s not him. Harmony’s death might have nothing to do with the Model Ones. That makes the most sense.”

  “Maybe it’s you after all.” Hunter laughed through his words.

  Liv glared at him. “It’s not.”

  I laughed too, but it was noise without feeling. If the letter writer wasn’t the murderer, that threw me right back into the suspect pool. What reason would my sleepwalking self have had for removing my chip? Murder seemed like a good reason—the premeditated kind.

  I hoped to God I was wrong and the letter writer had killed Harmony. And I hoped they found him soon.

  Hunter and Liv changed the subject to their weekend plans, and I dropped out of the conversation. I’d been upset with Harmony, even blamed her for what happened yesterday, but I didn’t want her dead.

  Plus, the Millers’ home had as much security as any house in the city. All the exterior doors locked digitally, and they had both cameras and chip scanners in every room. To shut down the entire system, someone had to have an approved ID chip or a passcode, and I knew for a fact that they changed their passcodes regularly.

  I released a slow sigh of relief. I wouldn’t have known where to start to commit this crime, especially in my sleep.

  “. . . but I’ve seen almost none of it except the physical-therapy room,” Hunter was saying. “I bet you’ve seen the whole building. Right? Lena?”

  “Huh?”

  “CyberCorp Tower,” Liv said. “Hunter has more therapy Saturday morning, but he’s itching to see the rest of the building. You’ve seen it a hundred times.”

  “Yeah, but it’s been years. When I was a kid, it was cool. But now, they care more about profit than improving people’s lives.”

  “But you can get us in?” Hunter asked. “For a tour?”

  “They don’t do tours. Almost everything above the lobby is confidential.”

  “They’ll do one for you though, right?”


  A girl in a passing cluster of students kicked my chair. She stared over her shoulder at me as they walked away, weaving their way between tables. At the table behind me, someone else mumbled, “Freak.” To my right, loud whispers called me a murderer.

  The cafeteria felt too small.

  CyberCorp Tower wasn’t my first choice of places to go. In fact, it was probably my last—second to last—after this school. And Jackson was there in the medical ward. I had put him there, so the least I could do was pay him a visit. It would be my penance. Or a decent start, anyway.

  I shoved back my chair and jumped to my feet. “Let’s go.”

  Liv’s brows shot upward. “Now? What about afternoon classes.”

  “Tell your teachers I have a medical emergency, and you guys have to accompany me to CyberCorp.” I looked at Owen. “We’re skipping classes. Is that a problem for you?”

  “My instructions are to let your mother know when you leave campus at the end of the school day.”

  “We’re leaving campus now.”

  “Mrs. Hayes won’t approve of that.”

  “Why don’t you call and ask her,” I said. “While you’re at it, we’re heading out.” I waved at Liv and Hunter to come with me. Owen hurried behind us to the parking lot, speaking softly into his micro-comm. With his long strides, he took only half as many steps as I did to keep up.

  At Liv’s car, I sat on the passenger side, and Hunter climbed into the backseat. Owen caught the door just as it was sliding shut.

  “Mrs. Hayes is unavailable, but her assistant Missy insists you stay at school.”

  “She wanted me to see Dr. Fisher. I’ll make sure to stop by while we’re at CyberCorp.” I yanked the door downward, but Owen held it firmly.

  “You can see the doctor after school.”

  “That’s nice.” I turned to Liv. “Drive.”

  Her gaze shifted from Owen to me, brow furrowed.

  “Drive,” I insisted.

  She pressed her foot to the accelerator, and the car responded vocally. “Door open,” the car chirped in a smooth female voice. “Door open.”